If you live in NYC and care about local restaurants, there's a nonprofit that helps you to easily find restaurants still open for pickup / delivery and to order directly: https://www.eatnyc.org/. Restaurants keep 100% of what you pay, so it really helps our favorite restaurants stay alive.
They have solid coverage in NYC, especially Manhattan.
Google maps has "takeout" as a search term, with filter by cuisine, open now, price range, distance. Plus you can usually see the menu and contact info and reviews not manipulated by Yelp sales people.
You should email them and ask if they can serve your area! They're pretty responsive. I emailed them at hi@eatnyc.org to request filtering by cuisine and they pushed the feature the same day.
I hope they keep GrubHub and Uber Eats separate, because UE has way stingier customers than GrubHub, in my experience. Something about the Uber brand seems to bring about all the no-tip Taco Bell orders from across town.
Uber is also more likely to play psychological game with its drivers. It's been a while since I drove for these services, but I remember GrubHub being pretty straight forward with how much you are getting paid. I think Uber hid the tip amount until you picked up the food. I imagine their driver support would be abysmal.
I'm stingier on Uber Eats because there are so many fees! But I haven't used Seamless since 2015 so I don't know if the same happens there nowadays.
All I know is that my $13 food choice costs me $22 when I go to check out, and I think twice about it, then check the promos, and then consider the price of just pickup, or order something else (lower price, or different restuarant with different delivery fees, or maybe add a $2 item to remove the $3 small order fee)
You price according to what the market can bear, as a participant of the market this has stretched the rationalization of what I am willing to bear, and if it isn't economically viable then maybe lay off 3,700 employees and buy the leaner competitor, crazy idea right
GrubHub tends to lean more on merchant costs (like commission) than consumer fees. This is why lately you may have seen (a) scary looking news articles about GrubHub taking half of a restaurants income, and (b) cities talking about emergency orders to limit commissions.
But either way, the economics are roughly the same: getting food made and delivered to your door is really really expensive. It just comes down to how that gets sliced between restaurant, consumer, and driver.
I'm in a suburban/semi-rural setting and have found Uber Eats to be more reliable than Grubhub in most cases. It seems like UE might open up GH to more of these markets where restaurants have been slower to warm up to working with a service like GH than restaurants in an urban center.
Interesting question. The backends will definitely be merged, but on the ordering side? Maybe it still makes sense to maintain separate brands. Expedia kept Orbitz up.
That would be smart of them because I know I'm not the only one that chooses not to use Uber on the grounds that they represent just about everything wrong with today's big VC funded corporations. However, I think they're more likely to just swallow GrubHub.
The pandemic finally broke my online food ordering habit, which was getting ridiculously expensive over the past year. Along those lines, I refuse to support Uber in any way as I loathe Uber's company culture. So Seamless (GrubHub) will be an instant uninstall if they are unfortunately bought by Uber. Which will continue to help curb my bad habits.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when Uber was a platinum level sponsor of a conference in Oakland on police militarization. And by that I mean a conference whose goal was to promote the use of military gear by police.
That's a pretty minor thing to hold against. A rider can cause any number of issues in the car including a very common issue of throwing while returning from a drunken night. How do you charge that person then? Lot of companies also use credit cards to tie account to a person so they don't abuse the initial sign up bonuses.
Yes, that is a relatively minor thing, but it remains a way that despite being "staunchly pro-consumer", they're less pro-consumer than traditional taxis.
> How do you charge that person then?
They could require a credit with Uber sufficient to cover that charge if someone wants to take a nighttime Uber ride.
> Lot of companies also use credit cards to tie account to a person so they don't abuse the initial sign up bonuses.
Yeah, but still, companies tracking purchases via credit cards is definitely not "pro-consumer".
If that's what we start calling pro-consumer companies then you will hardly find any pro-consumer companies. I can't even think of a company that is "perfect" if you are taking issues with such things.
Damn, I would really hate for Seamless to get swept into the Uber mess. I've been using them for a decade and it would be painful to give them up.
Though on the other hand, I've been doing the old school call and pick it up myself method with local restaurants during quarantine, and not only are their prices usually lower, it does feel good to know that (besides card processing fees from Visa) all that money is going into their pockets. Maybe I should just take this opportunity to stop using food apps anyway.
GrubHub would be wise to take the money and run. If it’s cash bank it. If it’s stock, buy some Uber puts.
The economics of last mile delivery can not justify these valuations so if Uber thinks they can make it happen with driver downtime then grab the cash while you can.
I’m pretty sure you can’t take a short position against the interests of your own company. That’s boilerplate language in the deals I’ve seen, for obvious reasons.
Carl Icahn may have found a way around this kind of restriction after the Lyft IPO by selling in a private transaction to someone who hedged in advance of the sale, although it's not at all clear what really happened.
Some companies will allow this, but only if it's a covered call or protected put on an investment that you own. The idea is that you're limiting your risk while also limiting the potential upside of the investment.
It's almost certainly going to be all-stock and any takeover will prevent anyone receiving shares from buying puts or shorting stock of the acquirer for the duration of the lockup. If you are an insider buying puts now you could also potentially look at some jail time.
It states in the article that it will be all stock. You take all these meal delivery companies, mix in other frothy VC-funded nonsense of uber and somehow end up with a triple-A portfolio made entirely of dog shit.
It's possible that executive insiders at Grubhub could be prevented from buying puts via a deal contract, but I can't see how members of the general public could possibly be limited by these sorts of deal terms.
> If you are an insider buying puts now you could also potentially look at some jail time.
Information is public at this point, you might breach a contract if you've got equity but it's not jail time. Assuming recent regulatory actions, even if your actions were egregious, it's likely no jail time, just a large fine and disgorging profits made.
There is definitely material information with respect to this deal that is still not yet public and trading on it, or even appearing to trade on it, would absolutely risk jail time.
I agree with you in the event you are someone with access to material non-public information. Your average IC outside of legal or finance is unlikely to have such information. My argument is that the potential transaction itself is now public. Obviously, if you have material non-public information, you should not trade on that unless you want to end up in a Matt Levine piece.
Insider meaning someone who knew about this deal. If you are an insider shorting things before deals are announced, you absolutely can face criminal charges which can include a prison sentence.
> you absolutely can face criminal charges which can include a prison sentence.
You can (the chance is not 0), but the chances are very rare based on recent historical SEC enforcement actions. I'm not advocating for securities fraud, I'm expressing the observation of lax enforcement by the SEC.
I wonder if any execs at grubhub might be True Believers(tm) in their industry and genuinely believe in the market and "synergies" enough from a deal like this to not immediately take out a big hedge or put a collar on their payout. I imagine investors wouldn't want to be stuck exposed to uber stock and would financially engineer away that exposure after a deal, but some of the executives could want that exposure?
That doesn’t matter. The point is to maintain the valuation until your lock up period expires. Once you can actually sell the stock you don’t need the puts.
The short seller's biggest annoyance. Jim Chanos is probably pissed off right now that another good short will be bailed out with private capital.
Uber has $9B cash on books in their latest 10-Q. I wonder if they'll burn some of that or will they issue new securities to finance this. It feels a little reckless to abandon half of your savings, especially as your cost of capital was just marked up and uncertain times are ahead.
Enormous marketshare on the East Coast of the US both on the restaurant and customer side, due to operating there for 20yrs. GH also has 10-20% share in most cities, so this acquisition would put Eats comfortably ahead of their main competitor DD.
Do they? For delivery, FOH is out of the equation, so there is a very big cost of running a restaurant that is not impacted.
"The delivery company loses money on the delivery."
They're a software/customer support service. At scale there has to be an inflection point.
"I just don’t think a burger can be profitably delivered 15 minutes away for 1.99."
It's way more than that... 1) the upfront cost the person pays (these services are sneaky about how this is calculated, often times the menu prices are adjusted for delivery + the hard fee)
2) the amount the restaurant pays 3) tip for the driver. The end user will end up paying $5 for say a $10 meal, and the restaurant might pay $2.
I guess the question is - does a person want to spend 30 minutes driving + gas vs. pay $5 for the convenience of delivery for a $10 meal? I think quite a few people will pick the latter.
Restaurants aren't software though. The FOH cost doesn't disappear like terminated EC2 instances. The sometimes-lavish furnishings and rent on a pricy, high-profile location with a lot of foot traffic remain, even after firing (human) servers/waiters and other FOH staff.
Ghost restaurants, which are restaurants run out of commercial kitchens away from downtown areas, and with no physical presence to speak of, using the Internet to drive orders, are trying out running FOH-less operations, but for an existing restaurant that's a bit more difficult a move to make. (Since a restaurant with ~no FOH staff has no human servers/waiters, maybe we could call that model serverless.)
Restaurants and delivery contractors should figure out very quickly if they come out positive on this. Maybe the restaurants won't figure out how much was cannibalization, but they'll know if it's a net loss. If you're losing money with, say Grubhub, you stop working with Grubhub.
The only question is if delivery services can find scale and a price point where they're profitable.
I did delivery for a slightly upscale pizza restaurant about ten years ago. For lower tier chain restaurants I think delivery driving was a scam in which the restaurant relied on the employee being unable to calculate that costs of gas + vehicle depreciation made the effective wage of driving delivery very close to zero.
I think the old world was restaurants squeezing delivery drivers. Now it's the app squeezing both the restaurant and the delivery driver.
Perhaps this is a bit dated, but one of my relatives once did delivery for a Chinese restaurant. He worked solely for tips. So in that case, the entire delivery was paid for by the customer.
Not so sure about pizza, but the tip issue probably comes into play there again. The customer covered the delivery cost and a 15% tip is more than most delivery fees in my area even on small orders.
To be fair, they often also pushed depreciation onto their (young, naive) drivers.
But other than that, there is essentially no marginal cost to the delivery infrastructure, you pay part of the driver cost directly (via tip), they at most take a cut to go to drivers (minimum) wages, but that's a fixed cost not % of checks.
Ancedotally (I don't have a ton of concrete details here):
1. From what I understand restaurants doing delivery largely were breaking even on it considering the costs - there was no third party looking to take 20-30% of the gross.
2. Again anecdotally, I suspect the old school pizza/chinese delivery places are more efficient in terms of deliveries per driver per hour. What I see with a lot of UberEats/Grubhub etc is drivers waiting a lot at restaurants, bouncing around a bunch to pick up one or 2 orders each. Vs the old-school pizza model of a driver being able to pick up a bunch of orders at once.
> the old school pizza/chinese delivery places are more efficient in terms of deliveries per driver per hour
Precisely this! It's amazingly inefficient to dedicate an entire person (and their 1000kg car) for the delivery of a single 2kg takeaway meal.
Uber tries to "solve" the problem by giving drivers two orders at the same time, but their implementation is terrible:
1. Sometimes the restaurant doesn't have both orders ready at the same time, so one of the orders is growing cold and soggy.
2. Uber's dispatch system has such a strong preference for batching deliveries together that a driver will often get assigned two orders that are going in opposite directions from the restaurant!
3. The high-volume restaurants (like McDonald's) have managed to exempt themselves from the double-delivery system [for the obvious reason that customers hate getting cold food!].
I did pizza deliveries back in my youth. Got 2-4 dollars plus tips for every trip. The 2-4 dollars essentially covered vehicle costs and the tips were what I made.
Thing is when I did we kind of optimized for the trip costs / payout. Deliveries only happened (for free) for orders over a certain value. During peak times (around dinner) we’d also batch orders. I’d often go out with 3 or 4 deliveries at a time and come back in about an hour with $30 or so just in tips. The 3 hours or so of dinner rush basically paid for the rest of the day.
For me the best was corporate offices. One order was an entire conference room of people ordering on the company dime with an auto 20% tip. Some times I would get close to $100 for a trip in the late 90s for 30 minutes to unload and load a car. Delivering flowers was also $10 a delivery. I would take off school on “flower holidays” and crush it at nursing homes and stuff. My parents were supportive of my hussle.
New Year’s Eve as well. Happy drunk people tip really really well. Also not sure they always knew how much they were tipping, but hey I was a broke 16 year old, I’ll take whatever is handed to me. I remember a couple of New Years eves I walked away from the night with a few hundred bucks. That was a lot of money for me at that age.
You can't expect run a 2k junker on significant monthly miles without incurring costs. You might be lucky, but it's a bad bet. Not to mention the risk that some mechanical failures may cost you your job.
Old cars are definitely cheaper to run (net) than new ones, but they aren't free.
Where are these $1.99 burgers? Every app I check has like a £10 minimum order, £2.50 delivery fee, £0.50 service fee, please tip our driver prompt, and jacked up prices compared to in-store.
Sorry, I get you. Yes I agree, that's not a sustainable price to be delivering food all over the place for. The depreciation on the driver's car is probably more than that.
If you care about your local restaurants and have the means to do so, consider calling in your order and picking it up yourself, with mask and gloves. Services like GrubHub take a huge portion (like 30%) of the ticket price just for delivery.
While I understand it is a business like many others, it'd be genuinely nice if GrubHub would stop airing their "restaurants are our family"/"support local restaurants" advertisements.
If we really want to support local restaurants (and give them better chances of post-COVID survival), we should do exactly as stated above: call in to order directly.
Do not give GrubHub, Uber Eats, and similar services a large portion of your order total just for being an easy-to-use middleman. The vast majority of restaurants around today are capable of processing payments and handling pickup/delivery themselves.
While these restaurants fight to stay alive in unprecedented times, the least we can do is put in a bit more effort for an order of food we would have placed and paid for anyway.
"Do not give GrubHub, Uber Eats, and similar services a large portion of your order total just for being an easy-to-use middleman"
Thank for the advice, but I highly value an easy-to-use middleman. How many orders would these restaurants miss out on if they didn't offer the easier option? And it's not just the ease of use (viewing the menu, adding comments, seeing real-time delivery status) but it's that fact that these services offer a centralized way to find restaurants to order from in the first place. I'm not saying I love the current balance of power, but much like with old-style taxi services, the new way is an undeniably better experience for the end user. People will never abandon the easier way, and much like with more traditional boycotts, relying on consumer action is a losing strategy for enacting change.
Those services will be there no matter what, true. And yes you can use it to discover new restaurant. But YOU, as an individual, can decide to not use them. Another thing I suggest is for you to ask the manager / owner of the small restaurant you frequently order from. Just ask point blank, would you rather me ordering it through the app or ordering through the phone. Based on their answer, you might actually change your mind.
At the end of the day, would I rather give 30% away to Uber, or would I rather pay directly the restaurant. I prefer encouraging small business, especially RIGHT NOW!
It depends what delivery service the restaurant contracts. It can be in-house, a 3rd party like Relay, or a delivery app like Doordash. But even if Doordash delivers, the restaurant still keeps more commission from the order itself if you order directly.
I didn’t know the restaurant could dispatch doordash on their own! That’s interesting.
Personally I use postmates, and with all the fees they stick on it, I’ve assumed it didn’t cost the restaurant anything. Does anyone know if this is true?
I agree somewhat. There definitely is a time where cutting profits to achieve more volume results in more revenue and profit. Not sure if it exactly is happening here but you do have a good point
Restaurants are pricing in the 30% cut, I know of no restaurants offering anywhere near a 30% price reduction for pickup - so why would I go for the more complex option? I'd love to call-in an order for a 20% reduction in price, or use a competing service for a 10% reduction.
It's entirely plausible that for many restaurants running an online ordering system/delivery network costs them 20-30% of the order price regardless.
I know that DoorDash specifically also raises the price of individual menu items by a $1 or $2 sometimes compared to paying the restaurant's menu price directly.
I've noticed higher costs too, but wondered if it had to do with having to order items separately instead of as a meal. For example, ordering a sandwich, fries, and drink, instead of a combo with the same thing.
When I found it, it was for a place called Ike's in the Bay Area. All of the individual sandwich prices were $1-$2 more than if you ordered directly from the Ike's app. It wasn't because of a combo price reduction or anything. (And funnily enough, Ike's uses DoorDash's white label delivery service to actually deliver the food.)
I stopped using Grubhub for pickup because the restaurants would consistently raise their prices on the app to make up for Grubhub's prohibitively expensive fee.
So THATS why the prices are more expensive! I don’t use Uber eats or grub hub because of this lack of transparency. I figured the app was increasing food prices and then charging me for delivery and a tip
Exactly this. GrubHub can be useful for trying out new places, but once you become a "repeat" customer, go direct. Many, many restaurants have their own online ordering systems and don't require you to make a weird phone-call. My favorite local restaurants all have ChowNow which charges restaurants a monthly fee rather than a percentage and has a grubhub-like ux. I also call in my order to the restaurants where I know the wait-staff and they always throw in extra portions for me :)
I have received “thanks for ordering directly” and “appreciate you skipping the tech leeches” when placing orders directly. So I think I’m going to go with what my local restaurants prefer.
It really pays to become a regular. Call and say "this is X give me the usual." Regulars are always treated nicer in terms of priority and portions. And since you're a regular you know what it'll cost and you can round up to the nearest $Y bill when paying.
Look I don't really understand this sentiment. This whole situation is absolutely shitty for everyone involved but I don't think the 30% cut is unreasonable.
Say I pay ~$20 dollars total for a delivery including tip. My usual Indian takeout order. A real human spends 30 minutes picking up and delivering my order and makes ~$7 (or a little less than $15/hr but not really since they're not getting a steady stream of deliveries). $4 of that order was my tip for the driver so the delivery service and the restaurant now have to divide up the remaining $9 which is already less than 70% of the menu price of what I ordered.
Unless people start getting okay with paying way more for delivery it's gonna continue being a "squeezing water from a stone" situation.
30% is totally reasonable for the cost of delivery. As you point out people hate paying for delivery in spite of the marked increase in cost/service.
Where things get complicated here is that a lot of takeout services will require businesses to offer items at the same price given to pickup/takeout orders. This constrains the restaurant's pricing while providing a large benefit to the delivery service. If the restaurant could just charge 30% more for people using the delivery service then fine. Instead they need to either make take out customers pay more which usually means making your neighbors and long term customers pay more to subsidize a large well funded company.
You might think so but I'm seeing a number of local restaurants offering free delivery if you call in your order directly so it would appear 30% is not, in fact, a reasonable cost for delivery. At least for some restaurants.
Restaurants make up for the 30% charged by apps by increasing the prices of the foods offered through the app.
None of the apps require businesses to offer items at the same price, and if they were to try an do so most restaurants would simply leave that app for one of their many competitors.
I think that's the actual complaint: the stone squeezing is happening at the expense of everyone but the customer or Grubhub. It'd be more sustainable for the actual businesses or the delivery persons if Grubhub took less of a cut or charged more of a delivery premium. (Implied: I value the sustainability of restaurants as more important than preserving the convenience/luxury of food delivery, and for edge cases where it's more of a necessity I'm sure we can come up with ways to address that.)
30% may not seem unreasonable to you as a customer and from the perspective of paying the delivery driver, but it can be deadly for the restaurant. Restaurant margins are low as it is, and an extra 30% cost on every order puts a lot of them in the negative.
You can argue that is a free market and restaurants are free to not participate if the cost is too high. Some do, at least some of the popular local spots around me are NOT on any delivery app. But most restaurants also can’t afford to not have this sales channel, especially during COVID. So now they are left in the shitty position of choosing between losing a lot of their orders and losing money on a lot of orders and hope dine in comes back soon.
It's unclear that restaurants are free to opt out. Grubhub "growth hacked" by listing restaurants that didn’t agree to be listed. The issue comes when customers aren't aware, and complain about delivery problems and seek refunds from the restaurant, who didn't agree to do delivery with Grubhub.
I wonder how that would even work from an ordering / delivery / fee perspective. If the restaurant has no partnership then there presumably isn't any integration. So if the restaurant does offer pickup, these platforms would what? Call the restaurant to place an order and then send a driver to pick it up? In this case I'd assume there wouldn't be any cut taken from the restaurant. I mean a drive can't really go to the restaurant and demand 30% off because they're picking up for grubhub.
It's not just the 30%, though. One restaurant's monthly statement[0] showed them not quite breaking even after all of the fees and charges were applied.
That said, I completely agree with the rest of your comment. We just don't want to pay what things are worth.
For anyone who doesn't want to read the above article, GrubHub took 64% of the gross, which wasn't enough to break even on just food costs.
Anyone claiming that GrubHub is only taking a 30% delivery fee and ignoring all of the other charges they tack on to reduce restaurants' income is simply lying.
Grubhub deductions were 64% of the gross. But "promotions" was 231$ which is 22% of gross. Promotions are discounts offered by the restaurants.
edit: reading further, grubhub auto-opts in the restaurants into this promotion. That's scummy, but also exists due to US auto opt-in. I believe in Europe, this wouldnt fly as they need you to explicitly opt-in, not explicitly opt-out after they implicitly opt-in. Scummy, but the american way
edit2: i think the verge, incorrectly reported in late march that restaurants "must" opt-in. from the perks program T+C. "Your participation in the Perks10 Program (the “Program” formerly known as “Supper for Support”) is optional. By electing to opt in each restaurant location identified to the Program, "
so 42% for both "advertising/marketing" (grubhub is providing the order to the restaurant). and delivery. If you link to grubhub from your restaurant's website. The advertising/marketing fee is waived
I just want the cost on the screen to be a reflection of the actual costs to bring food to my door. Let me make the judgement on whether I want to pay the delivery surcharge. Don’t obfuscate the true cost and silently punish the restaurants.
I think the only reason this model works is because people don’t actually know what is happening. I think if people knew GrubHub was running restaurants out of business they would consider alternative options.
Besides the matter of whether the cut they take is unreasonable or not, there's the matter of user experience.
Ordering on the phone is very easy. I don't need to make an account, don't need to get out my credit card, don't need to fill out my name, email address, etc. All the restaurants I order from seem to have systems that remember the address associated with incoming phone numbers, so after the first call I don't even need to tell them my address. If I order from a restaurant frequently enough, I often don't even need to tell them what I want, because they remember that too. It frequently goes "Hey, Big Joe's Pies, same as usual?" Yep. "Paying cash?" Yep. "Okay it'll be about 20 minutes." How can fidgeting around with an app compete with that?
Restaurants didn't previously have to pay this 30% charge on everything they make, because they had dine-in to balance it. Margins were already razor thin, and then the virus hit and now the only way to do business is to fork over 30% of your income to a third party, whose value add is likely not 30%.
If you live in NYC, there's a nonprofit that helps you to easily find restaurants still open for pickup / delivery and to order directly: https://www.eatnyc.org/. Restaurants keep 100% of the commission, so it really helps our favorite restaurants stay alive.
I mean... and also an entire international coordinated delivery network, apps that work on all devices, background checks, vehicle registration and checking sites, marketing, huge expensive legal departments, etc. The original algorithm behind Google search was also "pretty basic software" but there's a lot more that goes into building a successful product than writing some code.
an entire international coordinated delivery network
Why does a local restaurant care about an international delivery network?
apps that work on all devices
If by all devices, you mean iPhone and Android. Some services like Uber Eats are either not available in a browser or offer reduced functionality in the online version of their service.
background checks, vehicle registration and checking sites
It has been demonstrated many times that this is not true.
marketing
Marketing of a third party service, yes. Marketing of restaurants, no. Thus, this point is useless and arguably even detrimental to the restaurant.
huge expensive legal departments
Which does not provide support to the restaurant and thus is useless to the restaurant.
In fact, all these apps offer restaurants are vastly increased costs for minimal if any benefit.
> international coordinated delivery network, apps that work on all devices, background checks, vehicle registration and checking sites
So Uber does this but grub hub/seamless does not? The delivery folks who work for the restaurant do the deliveries for seamless and grub hub orders, at least in the NYC area.
Edit: I see now that grub hub has gotten into the business of managing the delivery as well, at least in some cases.
Note this is why places like Uber state as nitpickingly as they can: They do not deliver, and they do not taxi. They manage contracting.
There is no money to be had in actually being on the hook for having the assets to do the work. It's way easier to pawn off the depreciation to the naive sub-contractor, and pocket the middle-man's cut.
This is the key behind almost every commercial "tech" innovation. Exploit economies of scale by positioning yourself to extract fees from transactions that were not previously subject to having fees extracted. If that means facilitating more transactions than otherwise would have before so be it.
Stopping right there is enough seemingly for many business minded folks in the sense that new transactions = good; but I'm starting to realize there is definitely such a thing as toxic transactions, and it seems way more difficult for some reason to get this across to folks.
Then again, I'm getting older,and the rest of the world is becoming by and largeyounger than me. So that perspective may have more to do with me being a poor communicator than anything else.
Sure. Why don't you make a competitor then? Get yourself bought for $$$.
My guess is you'll discover it's far more difficult to onboard customers (restaurants are the customers) and consumers than you seem to think. Further, once it's mildly successful, it turns out maintenance is tough.
Edit: Looks like the "in a weekend" assertion was retracted.
I've been using this site to order from restaurants every week and sharing it with my friends. They also seem pretty responsive. I emailed them at hi@eatnyc.org to request a cuisine filter and they pushed it live the same day.
I've been a heavy Seamless user for a few years. I recently started only browsing on Seamless, and then once I decide, I go find that restaurant's ChowNow or other private hosted page and order directly. I've found on average I get better service, lower prices, and actually better quality food in some cases, where it seems like they made it fresh and sent it right away, instead of the meal sitting in an "uber eats" type car for an hour and getting cold. And, I really only have a "pool" of like, max, 12 restaurants or something. Once I make an account and put my credit card in on each site, it's exactly as easy as Seamless to go back and re-order my favorites at each place with a few clicks.
Shrug. I'm pretty sick of getting in the middle of this shit.
I'm already in the middle of it every time I eat out- having to add an arbitrary tip to the end of the my bill and always get surprised because I'm supposed to sit there and increase everything 10-20% of the menu prices.
Then I order groceries from walmart online and they try to bug me to add a $10-20 tip for every order that arrives.
Screw all of that. If the restaurants are paying too much, then they can figure it out. It's not my problem.. I'm done with it. Just show me what it costs.. telling me to go to the restaurant instead of using a service is ludicrous and pretty much defeats the purpose of delivery.
When I ordered from Costco last week, you know what they did? Increased all their prices so it included all the extra work. That way every item I ordered I could see exactly what I was paying- I didn't have a choice, which is great. I don't want the choice.
It charges an additional 15%+ for the marketing component (to get your restaurant listed and to appear higher up in search rankings).
In other words, if a restaurant sources their own customer and only uses Grubhub for delivery, they only pay 10%. This charge seems reasonable when compared to what it costs to have an inhouse courier.
"We understand that your restaurant's profit margin is already low and we don't want to reduce it even further with fees or commissions. That's why we offer this simplified, do-it-yourself ordering platform for free.
However, we do have (and continue to add to the platform) premium features that are more complex, that you can choose to pay for (if they bring extra value for your business). For example: online payments, promotions, sales optimized website, branded mobile apps."
We're not "an eatery discovery app" as our app is generally used by a single end user with a single brand (a sort of pseudo white-label) but we do service a similar market and are low priced relative to GrubHub. We don't do delivery but we do click&collect, online ordering solutions, cashless transactions for gift and loyalty, branded PWAs, Clover&Poynt integrations. Employee owned.
If you live in NYC, this nonprofit helps you find restaurants still open and order directly. Restaurants keep 100% of commission. I use it to order food every weekend. Local restaurants seem to really appreciate it.
You should reach out to them at hi@eatnyc.org! They're super responsive. I emailed them to request filtering by cuisine and they pushed it live the same day.
I don't think the market for "gig economy" is stable & mature enough to read anything like that from the delivery companies P&L. How much are they spending on expansion and various turf wars?
It's also pretty clear that delivery as a function doesn't scale linearly with check value...
I find that GrubHub will also oversubscribe their drivers by a huge amount. We tend to support restaurants more and don't use GrubHub but a few months ago we placed an order for a Thai place near us. The restaurant called and was like yah Grubhub took your order, and we'll make it, but they won't have someone here for a long time (2+ hours 10PM!) I'd cancel it.
I thought it was the owner not wanting them to take the rip but sure enough there was no sign of GrubHub going there. Calling them resulted in being connected to an offshore call center that said that we shouldn't cancel it is "in progress" but the projection was still over an hour later after we had been waiting 45 minutes. We finally cancelled and went there and got it ourselves. The restaurants I frequent often and know the owners I just call them or use their chow-now powered site. It is much more fair that way. Also saves the unpredictability of the whim of gig workers.
Honest question: what's stopping restaurants from charging 30% extra for items on GrubHub?
Transaction fees aren't new, and merchants typically bake that into the cost of doing business. Ostensibly, the end user would have to pay more for the convenience of someone else using their labor to deliver them food.
For example, from Uber's terms for UberEats restaurants[1]:
"Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Section 5, Merchant may not make any Item available to Customers through the Eats App at a price that is higher than the price that Merchant charges in-store for similar Items. Merchant agrees that you will not make an Item available under this Agreement at a price higher than the amount Merchant is charging for similar Items through any comparable platform for food delivery services."
That's fascinating, because out of all of the restaurants I have browsed on Uber Eats, I noticed about half had higher prices than they do on location (and generally significantly so—it wasn't uncommon to see a 20-30% difference). So they must not currently enforce it.
Edit: Even more interestingly, I rarely see this behavior on GrubHub. Maybe they have a history of enforcing it? Or are just more explicit about the rule? Or just coincidence? I'm not sure.
Every restaurant that I have seen on Uber Eats charges more for items on UberEats than they do in store. In some cases, the prices are 50% higher.
However, they don't charge more on UE than they do on competing delivery apps.
Also, the attorneys general of CA and NY have begun investigating these app pricing policies, so it's very likely they'll be deemed illegal by the end of the year.
Our office started looking for a service to use for collective ordering for about a dozen people: we tried grubhub, postmates and a few local services. We usually ordered from a set pool of local restaurants. When we started ordering prices went up considerably after a few orders. Some orders just got cancelled inexplicably and some just started adding a group service fee. We also had situations where we were limited to orders of a certain size so would have to split our groups to be able to order food for everyone. Our suspicion was that some places found ways to adjust to the demand and in some cases decided that the cost of doing business with us was too high due to some factors that were unknown to us. We also had a few of those services that dropped us as clients which is why we went through so many.
I once compared the fee across four major delivery sites for the same order at the same restaurant. It turns out, the food did vary by a few bucks between services.
My accounting is here (I mainly focused on the fee structure but the base food cost is there too)
GrubHub prevents it (or at least tries to). I think they enforce by fear, but I've seen restaurants get around it by giving smaller portions to grubhub orders than they would otherwise.
They do charge more, among other strategies. I think these sites/services drastically increase the competition for restaurants though, and I think delivery food prices are more elastic than the restaurants can handle if they increase prices to match previous net income.
> take a huge portion of the (like 30%) of the ticket price just for delivery.
At least for restaurants which don't offer delivery themselves (which is the vast majority), the delivery service may be creating more than 30% of the value of the final product. "A meal delivered to me from any restaurant within about 3 miles" is often a different product than "A meal that I need to spend 20-50 minutes going to and coming back from." Although they're similar, they aren't always substitutes for one another.
Obviously the adoption of delivery speaks for itself, but beyond that, I think if one just asked buyers how much of the value is provided by the delivery company, many or most would say over 30%. The target market does not consider it "just delivery."
I've encountered a handful of restaurants that no longer take orders by phone. In one case you call the number still printed on their pizza boxes, you get a prerecorded message telling you they only take orders from grubhub now. Sadly this means I can no longer order from them.
Sadly where I live during covid times this is not allowed :(
Some places, like bakeries and ice cream store can let people pick up orders, but food trucks for example can't, they must operate with doors (and windows in case of food trucks) closed and only send orders with delivery services of some kind.
And yes, delivery companies are expensive, a food truck owner I often chat with about business told me iFood charges them 30% of the total value, some restaurants then opt to have high food price, others just charge a lot for the delivery service, even then they might lose money (for example of they charge 5, but you buy only low margin dishes that cost 100, they lose money)
Will you also advocate for going directly to the kitchen and cutting out waitstaff when sit-down service resumes?
Advocating for cutting out the ordering/delivery company and delivery person is akin to cutting out the waitstaff since those are the ones taking your order and bringing it to you.
I wish there was a good option for delivery... but that they treat their employees and stores well, but the race to the bottom there seems to indicate there isn't.
A few stores locally have "we deliver" type messaging, but it's really just grubhub :(
While I agree with the sentiment, if people had the ability to go pick up their own orders they wouldn't be using delivery services in the first place. Remember that it's completely optional for the restaurant to even support it.
Most restaurants I see on delivery apps inflate their menu prices to compensate. And “calling in” implies that they have their own delivery people on staff, which isn’t true of the majority of restaurants that partner with these apps.
Not to forget the markup they charge from customers on the prices.
Paid 10% more even on a pick up order from a restaurant downstairs.
Learnt that the service is best used when you cannot drive to a certain place.
If food delivery and ride hailing continue to experience inverse demand relationships, there's a pretty big synergy here in being able to keep your drivers (oops, I mean the independent business owners you've contracted with) busy.
Not to sound like a party pooper but is it staring to seem like Ubers recent strategy is akin to chasing cars?
- in 2019 Uber threw itself into bike share after cities had success with it.
- Uber scooters followed immediately after Bird scooters
- Uber self driving showed up almost instantly after Waymo.
- Uber eats showed up almost immediately after GrubHub.
Is there anything meaningfully unique this company does anymore?? I mean the self driving truck company they bought basically imploded. its got 22 individual criticisms on Wikipedia everything from murder and sexual assault to tax dodging.
There is a lot of money to be made in making "your idea, but more polished and well integrated into an existing ecosystem". Just look at Apple as the prime example.
Not sure, but here in the US, GrubHub has been popular for a long time. I remember ordering from their website before ride-sharing apps even existed. Back then, GrubHub was just an online ordering service, they didn't do the delivery.
Since Uber has publicly stated that they will lay off 20% of their employees rather soon, how does this new decision to acquire GrubHub square with that [0]?
Amazon adding a delivery service to their Amazon Fresh + Wholefoods would crush all of the food delivery apps. Not sure why they are still trying with random restaurants, which will never give you a stable profit line.
After laying off 14% of their workforce they're going with an acquisition? This makes zero sense.
Healthy companies do not have a large restructuring and then try to burn capital on an acquisition for revenue. Restructuring to be acquired is a different story.
Selling to restaurants to convince them to onboard to your platform is a slow, expensive process that's neither easy nor guaranteed. GrubHub has acquired many other companies (e.g. Eat24) in the past purely for the relationships/business.
I hate this. The implication that companies should have any moral behavior here just enables immoral behavior.
There is no dick move here. The only reason you call it that is because we have a society (America) built to give almost no support system to workers if they lose their jobs. The company isn't in the wrong for failing to pay users. Our societal structure is. Our lack of social safety nets, and communally focused behavior is.
We set up a system prone to Americans getting screwed, and then are annoyed when companies screw them? This is our mess. We need to fix it, and not try to pretend companies should be moral. Doing so will only allow them to be immoral and hurt workers.
I completely agree with what you said. One important consideration is how companies like Uber have contributed to a lack of support for workers who are laid off. Uber in particular has failed to pay billions of dollars into states' unemployment insurance funds.
Large companies have outsized impact on influence public policy, using bribery aka lobbying. Collectively, billions are spent yearly to influence lawmakers.
The idea that large companies "just exist" in this system and abide by its rules strikes me as naive. In many cases, companies are making the policies themselves through lobbying efforts. They also influence governing agencies that are supposed to police them. It's called regulatory capture and it's a well established phenomenon.
> We set up a system prone to Americans getting screwed, and then are annoyed when companies screw them
When the companies are the ones advocating for policies that screw workers and stop lawmakers from creating proper protections, yes, annoyance is a mild way of putting it.
I agree with you, but that's sort of a side topic to my main complaint. The objection I had was applying moral standards to a company.
> Large companies have outsized impact on influence public policy, using bribery aka lobbying. Collectively, billions are spent yearly to influence lawmakers.
Agreed entirely. But the objection wasn't about the root cause for the society system we have. My complaint was about using a moral argument as to why a company should spend their money to provide a social safety net for its workers.
Trusting companies to do the right thing is, at the root, why we are where we are. Companies lobbied for freedoms and the public agreed with it, in the sense that we largely ignored it. We can't be angry at companies for not acting moral. They're working within the freedoms that we allowed them.
But again, I'm not arguing the root cause or anything. Just merely saying that if our only tool in this "fight" is a moral finger wagging, oh boy oh boy will we be in for a quick loss.
> Companies lobbied for freedoms and the public agreed with it...They're working within the freedoms that we allowed them.
This is the part of the argument I'm contesting. I'm not convinced that the public went along with it because companies put forth a well reasoned argument. It's not that we agreed to it, more so that they rigged the system in their favor, despite the opinions of the people.
I think if you poll most Americans, they wouldn't agree that Wal Mart can pay minimum wage and also have employees on food stamps. Or that CEOs should get paid x50 the average worker salary. Or that Amazon should be able to fire employees for trying to unionize. Or that coal mines can dump toxic waste in rivers.
There's actually a huge list of things companies do that are against what many Americans believe, and yet they still get their way. That's my point. The power balance is truly in the favor of the corporate elite. I'm really not sure how much we're letting them do anything, and how much they're just rigging the system the way they want it.
Well that's my contention, that the opinion of Americans only matters as far as they're willing to act.
Americans are pushovers, and if they're not willing to do anything other than share their opinions, what good are their opinions?
It would be like if a Union refused to strike, how much "power" would they actually have? The power of a Union is in the coordinated action of the people, not of the coordinated opinion. Likewise, if Americans refuse to act on this, why would they be listened to?
You could argue that the primary purpose of government over the last few centuries has been to support corporations. Many of the instigators of the American revolution were merchants who didn't want to compete with low prices from British importers.
Nope. Lobbying is simply petitioning the government to do things. It can be used for good or evil. All that privacy legislation people like is a result of lobbying by pro-privacy organizations, for example.
Also a naive take. The idea that lobbyist contribute campaign donations and then magically get policy out of it is plainly obvious for anyone to see. In theory, yes. In practice, lobbying is institutionalized bribery for those with money to influence the government. Sure, anyone can "lobby" the government but the reality is that money walks and talks. If privacy groups got what they wanted, it's because they too donated to said elected officials.
This is a bit like saying buying croissants+coffee for breakfast after throwing out last night's leftover takeout pizza+beer is somehow a character flaw.
The layoffs were in customer support, who - if you think about it - were largely twiddling thumbs due to the large loss of ridership (and therefore, of customer support demand).
It's not like Uber could just magically take CSRs and somehow turn them overnight into roles that were strategically meaningful for food delivery competitiveness.
You can buy a company in all stock, but it's quite a bit harder to buy labor with 100% stock compensation. If Uber is dipping into cash reserves for a deal like this, well, I hope for their sake this deal goes well. And if it is a all stock or majority stock deal, I wonder if Grubhub is going to ask for an even higher premium on their valuation than otherwise considering that 4.5 billion in uber stock with a lockup period of a few years at this time is probably not as valuable as the same amount in cash.
A lockup period or vesting schedule would make it a far less liquid asset for you. If it wasn't given with a lockup period, they'd probably have to come up with some staggered way of paying out stocks rather than at the end of every month or every other week so you dont get huge periodic selling spikes as employees sell off enough to cover their tax burden and expenses when the stocks come in. They might also be running foul of minimum wage laws. I think there are a lot of obstacles that make it operationally infeasible, even if employees are willing to accept it.
As an external investor why would you be on that ride for a second time? Uber has demonstrated that they are not able to deploy capital in a sustainable way to acquire market share in ride hailing, or with UberEats. As most companies that grow through acquisition fail to deliver material gains - why would the acquisition of GrubHub fair any better?
Probably because Grubhub was marginally profitable until 2018/2019, until both UberEats and Doordash started to barge in throwing fresh VC money. Grubhub never made a lot of money though, so it's a little unclear how much like end state monopoly would be worth. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GRUB/grubhub/net-i...
I'm not a fan of how either company treats their non employees, but you still make the business decisions that you need to to try to keep everyone else employed too.
they shouldn't have been trying to inefficiently create uber eats so quickly. so cut out that nonsense, and buy the established player that has probably negotiated better pricing. Uber probably outbid them in a lot of restaurants to get into those restaurants quickly.
Because, historically, the core "ride" part of Uber's business only turned a profit within Q4 2019. Their IPO also indicated that only a few of their operating markets were profitable, many operating at a loss.
Everything that we attribute to a modern way of life: our food options, the ability to freely communicate with anyone in the world, modern transportation, home appliances, clothing, and finally the global supply chains that enable all of the above — are all provided to society by so called "business champions".
Isn't the life well-off people in the United States only possible in its current form because of massive exploitation of people and resources? How is that in any way sustainable, and why should it be sustained?
I don't know, do you think that Google Maps and Google Search (and all of its contribution to QoL improvements) have been brought to you by way of exploitation of people? Which people?
Or if you're referring to the outsourcing of work to the 3rd world as exploitation, how does that square with the fact that the standard of living has been dramatically increasing, globally? Do you think that out-sourcing of work will happen forever? Why do we choose to out-source manufacturing work to China instead of Belgium or Japan?
I don't think that I disagree that resources are exploited, but that's true regardless. The only way to produce modern goods & services to people is through resource extraction. Either that operation is centrally coordinated by state actors, or it's de-centrally coordinated by corporations.
> I don't know, do you think that Google Maps and Google Search (and all of its contribution to QoL improvements) have been brought to you by way of exploitation of people?
Unequivocally yes.
> Which people?
The users. Most of whom have no idea that their personal information, browsing history, and spending habits are being harvested and monetized.
Okay, but is this universally true for ALL businesses that produce ALL goods and services?
The TV in your living room, the couch, the desk, the food in your fridge, the soap in your bathroom, the sheets on your bed — are they provided by "exploitation"?
NB: I have little patience for the Marxist argument that all workers are exploited due to "profit"...the labor theory of value has been largely debunked.
> The TV in your living room, the couch, the desk, the food in your fridge, the soap in your bathroom, the sheets on your bed — are they provided by "exploitation"?
Of course. Some examples from like a minute of searching:
You haven't proven that this is UNIVERSALLY the case. Your original beef was with the abstract concept of "business champions". It is entirely possible for some businesses to be good and some to be "bad".
I look at all of these examples you've shown me, and my conclusion isn't that "business champions" are bad, it's that "slave labor" is bad. We can easily compartmentalize that, and even outlaw it.
More fundamentally, businesses are just associations of people, just like non-profits, or clubs, or churches, or government agencies. All play a part in society to produce the standard of living most of us enjoy. If your beef is with those that live in poverty, consider that the poverty rate is the lowest it's ever been — GLOBALLY.
The only reasonable blanket argument against all businesses is the argument that central planning yields better outcomes, and therefore all businesses are bad, and "business champions" are net negative to society. It's a coherent argument, but not one that I agree with.
I don't have proof that it's universally the case. I expect it pretty much is, but if you have any counter examples please share them. I'd love to see something that would make me feel less bad about the world.
Could you explain what you mean by "We can easily compartmentalize that"?
(Slavery/forced labor was just what I decided to google quickly. You could also look at environmental damage from mining, fossil fuels, shipping, flight, etc)
> I don't know, do you think that Google Maps and Google Search (and all of its contribution to QoL improvements) have been brought to you by way of exploitation of people? Which people?
Absolutely. The tech industry doesn't exist in a vacuum. I'm definitely not an expert or very knowledgable on this, but it seems unlikely that Silicon Valley could have come into existence without cheap food, clothes, electricity, and hardware, all of which we have as a product of cheap labor (farming, resource extraction, manufacturing) and resources.
For example, My phone--and I assume the laptop I used to type and send this message--has a good chance of having been assembled using forced/slave labor.
> Or if you're referring to the outsourcing of work to the 3rd world as exploitation, how does that square with the fact that the standard of living has been dramatically increasing, globally? Do you think that out-sourcing of work will happen forever? Why do we choose to out-source manufacturing work to China instead of Belgium or Japan?
I assume it will continue forever in some form, although I'd expect where it happens will shift. Do you expect outsourcing to stop?
> I don't think that I disagree that resources are exploited, but that's true regardless. The only way to produce modern goods & services to people is through resource extraction. Either that operation is centrally coordinated by state actors, or it's de-centrally coordinated by corporations.
I suppose one of my points is that resource extraction harms people without regard to whether or not they benefit from it, and that it doesn't seem like people benefit in proportion to how much it harms them. Further, the people who are benefiting the most from extracted resources tend to live far away from where it happens.
Cheap labor != slave labor. Different labor has different market value in different locations, and this is a result of a difference in standard of living.
> I assume it will continue forever in some form, although I'd expect where it happens will shift. Do you expect outsourcing to stop?
> I suppose one of my points is that resource extraction harms people without regard to whether or not they benefit from it, and that it doesn't seem like people benefit in proportion to how much it harms them. Further, the people who are benefiting the most from extracted resources tend to live far away from where it happens.
But on the flip side, standards of living are not static. The standard of living in Japan has increased, to the extent that it is no longer economical to outsource low-skill work there. China's standard of living is increasing, and it will eventually be as economical to outsource work to China as it is to outsource labor to Japan or Belgium.
Manufacturing will constantly move to the next poorest country, in perpetuity, seeking out the next cheapest labor pool until there is none left. The ensuing equilibrium would have globally high standards of living with diversified supply chains, with any concentration largely being a function of 1) access to natural resources, and 2) access to expertise. One could argue that this is a desirable end state...for everyone.
Note that "slave labor" is fundamentally different, and is also not unique to private corporations — even state actors have the capacity, and incentive to cut corners to deliver goods & services. Just like I would rather pay less in prices for goods & services, voters would rather pay less in taxes to state actors for the same. This is not an indictment of businesses, it's an indictment of slavery. It is entirely possible to compartmentalize that, and address it directly.
> Cheap labor != slave labor. Different labor has different market value in different locations, and this is a result of a difference in standard of living.
Does the distinction between cheap and forced labor matter at some point? The fact that there's such a difference in the standard of living is basically my entire objection. Why is that difference acceptable? Why should someone get to make enormous amounts of money while someone else can barely afford food?
> Manufacturing will constantly move to the next poorest country, in perpetuity, seeking out the next cheapest labor pool until there is none left. The ensuing equilibrium would have globally high standards of living with diversified supply chains, with any concentration largely being a function of 1) access to natural resources, and 2) access to expertise. One could argue that this is a desirable end state...for everyone.
I guess I need to learn more about this. Can you give me some resources showing that we're going to reach a point where there isn't poverty and exploited labor? It seems like an extraordinary claim.
> Why is that difference acceptable? Why should someone get to make enormous amounts of money while someone else can barely afford food?
That's not what that means — some nations are developing and some are developed. The cost of a burger in a developing African country is a fraction of the cost of the same burger in the US. Labor is cheap there because you could meet most of your basic needs (food, water, clothing, shelter, etc) for LESS money, in real terms, than in the US.
But like I said, the standard of living is not static. Countries develop over time. At one point in time, the US was a poor country, European countries were poor, Japan was poor, South Korea was poor etc. Their standards of living all increased due to global trade. Ironically enough, their standards of living all increased because some people made enormous amounts of money.
In fact, at present, the only way we really know how to turn a DEVELOPING country with a low standard of living into a DEVELOPED country with a high standard of living...is trade and economic growth.
> I guess I need to learn more about this. Can you give me some resources showing that we're going to reach a point where there isn't poverty and exploited labor? It seems like an extraordinary claim.
Sure, there are plenty. Take China for example[1][2]. We have seen household income and cost of living increase over the last 3 decades, owing to break-neck development and economic growth.
It's an out-sourcing hotspot TODAY because labor is cheap there. But given the current trends, we can almost be certain that labor there will be expensive TOMORROW. At some point, the cost of paying a Chinese worker to build an iPhone will be the same as the cost to pay an American in Wisconsin to do the same.
A profit-seeking business will then choose to move to a cheaper labor market, and keep repeating the same cycle...until there are no more cheaper labor markets left because the Vietnam and Ghana of tomorrow will look like the Japan and China of today.
> "More information is available on the bloomberg terminal"
And I thought "Sign up for blah news Premium(tm) for 9.99/day or whatever to access the rest of this article" was bad. At least those subscriptions aren't 20k/person/year licenses for financial services/trading software ...
That's true. Bloomberg terminals are pretty awesome. The customer base for them are probably the customer base the most able to quantify how much value any software provides to their business, and could afford a far higher price as well. Though I imagine Thomson Reuters and other competitors might be getting in the way of bloomberg capturing more value than they already are.
I suspect the latter is true, in a way it wasn't years ago and they were just ridiculously ahead.
On the cost, one person I know who uses them commented that on any given year they wouldn't have much trouble picking one day where it paid for itself (i.e. that day made the whole year subscription worthwhile).
How is this random? Uber has been making significant investments in the food delivery space via their Uber Eats offering. Consolidation makes sense given industry-wide razor thin margins and intense competition.
They have solid coverage in NYC, especially Manhattan.